ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN CONSTRUCTIONS SECTOR - EXPLANATORY ECONOMIC FACTORS AND FORECASTS FOR ROMANIA

Entrepreneurship is an active field of study; however entrepreneurship in the field of construction has been relatively neglected in recent research. The construction sector’s importance lays in its multiplier effect, through employment, consumption of materials and by providing infrastructure for further economic development. In order to maximize this effect, innovation and entrepreneurship in construction are critical factors. We have investigated the relation of several economic factors with entrepreneurship in construction and have found that the volume of construction works, the number of construction workers, building permits and the subjective opinion of the businesspersons in the construction industry, expressed through a conjecture index, have a long and medium term positive relation with it, while unemployment, Consumer Price Index, Construction Cost Index and Closure of construction companies have a negative relation with entrepreneurship in construction, taking into account different time lags for each variable. The negative relation in the case of unemployment and inflation, on the other side, have long time lags (15 and 21 months, respectively) suggesting that these economic phenomena might have long term negative consequences on entrepreneurship in construction, and by extension on the construction industry as a whole. We performed several forecasts (based on ETS (M,N,M) and ARIMA methods) and we have concluded that the level of entrepreneurship in construction in Romania for the next 2 years will remain relatively unchanged, save for intra year seasonal variances. Therefore external intervention will be required if one wants to encourage growth in this field. Taking into consideration the relations that we have uncovered in the first section of the paper, these external interventions should focus not only on encouraging entrepreneurship through various individual or company level measure, but on a larger scale, for instance through construction cost related inflation control, and by encouraging construction works, for instance through infrastructure projects